jewelry design

I have finished my mixed metal feather necklace and am pretty excited to share it with all of you. I got to use my bail making pliers that I introduced to you in my previous post to create the clasp (hook and eye) for this. I will be putting together a tutorial in a future post to show you how I created this type of clasp, so make sure to check back for details. Here is a picture of the hook park of the clasp before I put it on the necklace:

Here is another picture of the clasp shown on the necklace. It shows a nice close up of the chain links that were also created with wire and wire wrapping techniques:

Here is a picture of the completed necklace:

I used copper, brass, and silver toned metal/wire for the hardware/chain. Two turquoise beads accent the area where the chain becomes tiered with the feathers. The bottom, middle feather is accented with a really pretty abalone bead that has three different sides to it. I also used silver/clear colored seed beads and bronze glass beads as accent beads throughout the piece. The feathers are random ones that I have collected from craft projects over the years. Isn’t the subtle green flash on the one feather so pretty when matched with the turquoise bead? I love it!

I had fun making this piece and plan on doing more with beads, wire/wire wrapping and feathers. I also have a few feather earrings that I am currently working on as well. I’ll be posting about those when they are completed.

In my previous post, I had mentioned that I had created screw eye posts from scratch for the resin tile in my turquoise and brass bracelet. I would like to share how I created those with my readers as I am sure many of you have run into the same issue where you’d like to have your own screw eyes for your resin pieces. It’s especially nice when you are working in different metals and aren’t able to find matching findings at your local or online craft or jewelry supply store. The first thing you will want to do is gather your supplies for this. Since I used all brass colored findings, it was important for me to match my wire to this, so I used the following wire for my screw eyes:

Please note that you can use any type of wire for yours, but it is a good idea to match the gauge of your wire to the rest of your project, especially if you are using chain or lots of jump rings. You want the gauge of the findings to match one another so the piece has a consistent weight and holds together nicely.

Next, you will need some basic wire wrapping tools; these will help you form your screw eyes:

To start making one screw eye, cut off about 1.5 inches of wire from your spool of wire.

Using the wire looping pliers, form a loop in your wire by folding it in half.

Hold this loop with your wire looping pliers and grab one of the ends wrapping it twice around the other piece of wire, which will be the post part of your screw eye.

Cut the tail off of the piece of wire that you wire wrapped around the other end (the post part of your screw eye) with the wire/flush cutter pliers.

Straighten out the post part of your screw eye and fix any bumps or irregularities with the nylon jaw chain nose pliers.

If you find that your screw eye post is too long, you can shorten it to suit your needs by cutting it with the wire/flush cutter pliers.

Here are what your finished screw eyes should look like:

They look especially nice when placed into resin tiles as such:

Please note that when I drilled the holes for these, I made it so that the spiraled part of the screw eye would be set into the resin, so I had to use a drill bit that was just a little bit of a larger gauge than the wire I used for this project. This enabled me to be able to “screw” my handmade eye posts into the piece like a regular machine made screw eye. To finish things off, I used Devcon 2 Ton Epoxy to set my screw eyes into my resin title. Thanks for stopping by!

This is my next bracelet, which is made from a resin tile cast with baby pine cones from may backyard and a feather I had found. I decided to use all brass findings for this to keep with the natural, warm coloring of the resin tile. As a result of this, I had a hard time finding screw eye posts for the resin tile that matched my wire, jump rings and chain, so I decided to make my own (as shown in the picture below). I will show you how I did this in my next post, so stay tuned!

Here are the pictures of the finished bracelet. I used turquoise for the main beads of the bracelet and bronze colored crystal beads for the accents.

Here is my first official post. I am going to keep it short for right now as it is getting late, but I wanted to share a few quick pictures of the necklace that I just finished up the other night. The pendant piece is of a moth, which I found outside my house last Fall, embedded in casting resin. I set the pendant piece on a brass bezel and created the necklace part from brass wire and chain that I accented with crystals and freshwater pearls.